ND
Rural Life is what remains of the website of the defunct Center for Rural
Studies.
After the demise of the center, I assembled a collection of UND faculty
and rural activists and advocates as a regional/rural advisory group to
explore the
establishment of a regional studies center at the University of North
Dakota along the lines of the Canadian
Plains Research Center at the University of Regina. The
rural/regional advisory group believes that a regional/rural center should focus
on connections to place.

Such a center could focus on the culture,
society, economy, politics, history and environment of the Northern Great
Plains. This position was also supported by Clay Jenkinson,
a noted Jefferson
scholar, who said at a UND 125th Anniversary event on
March 14, 2008, that higher education
institutions in this state should focus on place:

Jenkinson, scheduled to
participate in a Friday afternoon panel discussion on the future of education in
North Dakota, ended his morning presentation as Jefferson by discussing that
topic. His speech focused on the University of Virginia, which Jefferson built
with that state’s Legislature after his final term as president. But Jenkinson’s
Jefferson several times drew parallels between that school and UND and other
North Dakota universities, which he said too often fail to teach students what’s
unique about their state. “Your mission is to teach your children about
the agrarian vision of North Dakota,” he said. “If you become a university like
others, you will have failed.” Jenkinson, a native North Dakotan, expanded on
that statement after the presentation, saying he feared that UND, North Dakota
State University and the state’s other public colleges had sacrificed their
unique characters in their drive for national respectability. As a result, he
said, the universities have become “floating platforms that could be in
Winnipeg, Duluth or Mankato. “There’s higher respectability but lower value
because only the schools here can teach about this place.”